by Charlie Edwards | Jan 23, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Alex has blogged before about black swans and the human assumption that the unexpected can be predicted by extrapolating from variations in statistics based on past observations. Nassim Taleb argues they can’t. But that hasn’t deterred Oxford Analytica, the consulting firm that draws on a network of over 1,000 senior faculty members at Oxford. The company has developed an Early Warning system to meet exactly these needs, catchily named the ‘Global Stress Points Matrix’. According to OA:
The Global Stress Points Matrix provides a means of identifying and monitoring potential political and economic surprises and threats. These may appear unlikely but would have severe consequences should they occur. It is a disciplined approach for ‘stepping outside conventional wisdom’ and uses Oxford Analytica’s global network of experts to ‘ask the right questions’ and the Oxford Analytica Daily Brief process to monitor developments.
There’s a cool matrix too:
Some of the stress points:
1 CHINA/TAIWAN: Armed hostilities
2 US/IRAN: US strike on Iran
3 INTERNATIONAL: Human avian flu pandemic
4 UNITED STATES: Deep recession
5 INTERNATIONAL: Oil price shock
6 PAKISTAN: State collapse
7 INTERNATIONAL: Return to protectionism
13 SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY: Increasing climate regulation
14 RUSSIA: Return to regional ascendancy
18 NORTH KOREA: Military conflict
19 NIGERIA: Large-scale disorder in the Delta
21 CENTRAL ASIA: Risk of major disorder
22 BALKANS: Return to serious
If any of this does actually happen don’t say we didn’t warn you….
by Alex Evans | Jan 19, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
So here we are at the Fabians’ foreign policy conference, and we’ve just heard from Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Here, brutally distilled, is the gist of his speech:
– Globalisation and growing interdependence imply shifts in the balance of power “from west to east, from national to international, and between governments and people”. On one hand there’s a ‘civilian surge’: empowered individuals who blog, who campaign, who protest stolen elections in Kenyan slums. But on the other hand, there’s the reality of growing insecurity at all levels from local to global.
– No political ideology has yet found the language or substance to address all this. The right is conflicted between its desires for order, and for economic freedom. The left has a different problem: it wants a just distribution of resources, effected by the state, but also favours a ‘radical liberalism, a pluralism that exists outside of the state. The trick the left must pull off is to synthesise the two.
– These questions are a big deal internationally. Suppression of individual rights by states is a big issue in the ‘civilian surge’. And we have to ask big questions about distribution of goods and entitlements: e.g. who gets access to nuke technology, how to build a fair global climate regime.
– And they raise profound questions of governance – where there are four themes. 1) ‘Faltering states’, where the international community has a responsibility to intervene – not only militarily, but also through soft power and influence. 2) States that are too strong – e.g. Burma, Pakistan, Kenya. Here too, the international community must defend universal values – which are real, and popular. 3) Regional institutions like the EU have a crucial role in projecting their values beyond their borders. 4) Global institutions, where we need a Fukuyama-esque ‘multi-multilateralism’.
– Britain’s role in all this: a ‘hub’ in the global network (rather than a ‘bridge’ between US and EU).
by Alex Evans | Jan 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, South Asia
Charlie Edwards at Demos points us towards news from the BBC:
The authorities in Pakistan have deployed paramilitary troops to guard wheat supplies around the country amid fears of a massive shortfall. The government has blamed hoarders and smugglers for the problem. Wheat is a staple food in Pakistan and shortages have led to large scale rioting in the past.
Flour shortfalls initially pushed up market prices. Later flour ran out on the open market when officials fixed prices and warned against violations. Now Pakistan’s national disaster management authority has deployed thousands of paramilitary troops at wheat stores.
Other BBC coverage notes that last week Afghanistan appealed for international help to combat a wheat shortage, while Bangladesh has warned it faces a crisis over rice supplies.
Here (again) is a link to my briefing note from December on international implications of rising food prices. Food prices will be one of this year’s standout issues. Donors and multilateral agencies are not looking well prepared…
by Alex Evans | Jan 2, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
With the death count now well into the hundreds, and the number of Internally Displaced People from the Rift Valley alone placed at 70,000 by the Kenyan Red Cross, decision-makers at aid agencies must be wondering whether they’re hallucinating. As Richard Dowden quotes a Kenyan friend: “But these things don’t happen in Kenya!”.
As if to prove the point about Black Swans, Kenya has erupted just as the eyes of the world were focused exclusively on Pakistan. A scan of media reporting before polling took place shows that the prevailing mood among opinion formers was upbeat: few saw this coming. The Times‘s take on 27 December, for instance, was cheerful:
For many observers, the very fact that the race is so close run is a sign of how far Kenya has come in 15 years of multiparty democracy. An incumbent has never before faced a credible challenge.
Even on the day of the election itself, when rumblings from Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement were becoming audible, the picture seemed to be broadly positive. Here’s the IHT:
So far the election period has been relatively peaceful, with a few scattered bursts of violence but no widespread turbulence. Foreign election observers, including the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, have praised the process, saying it was free and fair, though at times a little chaotic.
“At times a little chaotic” neatly sums up the international community’s attitude to Kenya until now. ‘True, it’s endemically corrupt’, went the standard line, ‘but it’s stable: in spite of everything the state more or less works’. Often, Kenya was invoked in the same breath as Tanzania or Zambia, as an example of a ‘ruminant’ rather than a ‘vampire’ state. Rather than being of the purely blood-sucking variety, the argument went, the corruption in Kenya was of the sort that gave something back – producing fertile ‘manure’ in the form of infrastructure projects and so on.
But as Richard Dowden – one of the few commentators who can claim to have provided ample warning of risks in Kenya – noted yesterday, “Kenya has been a catastrophe waiting to happen”.
Kenyan politics are more than a lucrative game of musical chairs for the elite. They are the most vicious and tribalised on the continent. Politicians often address their own people in coded language. “It is our turn to eat!” is a phrase they often use. It means that it is the turn of our ethnic group to rule — and loot as much as we can.
The issue of spoils politics, and donors’ attitude to it, is at the very heart of the conundrum that Kenya now poses to the international community. It’s been a while since President Mwai Kibaki has been a ‘donor darling’, but there’s no doubt that that’s exactly what he was after his election victory in 2002. His subsequent relapse into clientelism and patronage politics is entirely consistent with the ‘passionate-love-affair-followed-by-fall-from-grace’ archetype that aid agencies seem unable to resist – whether with Museveni in Uganda, Meles in Ethiopia, or (dare one recall), one Robert Mugabe.
When the dust has settled and the wash-ups and lessons-learned exercises get underway in earnest, there will be two central questions for donors. One: what’s the role of aid in fragile states? Is it actually helpful to spray vast volumes of cash into directly into governance systems fundamentally based on patronage, in the form of budget support? And two: what is donors’ theory of influence in such states? If they can recognise that the problem is not to do with individuals like Kibaki or Odinga, but is instead systemic, then what can donors do to change that system – or at least avoid propping it up? For what it’s worth, here’s an attempt to answer those questions that I made back in May last year.
Happy new year.
by Alex Evans | Nov 29, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Wired brings news of the latest counter-insurgency innovation from the US Army – ‘Human Terrain Teams’. Some creative thinking about influence is underway:
Each team is getting a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish and software for social network analysis, so they can diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic and tribal landscape.
Wired explains that “the idea behind HTTs is to take what a brigade already knows about the local population and combine it with social-science research, to produce a sense of how the society around them really works”. The Army has set aside $41 million with which to deploy 150 “social scientists, software geeks and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year”. Six such teams are already on the ground.
However, some anthropologists are up in arms about their academic brethren using their skills to help the US Army:
The executive board of the American Anthropology Association, or AAA, recently blasted the HTT program as immoral. Because anthropologists in the effort could help in “identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations,” the board wrote, information derived from the program “would violate the stipulations in the AAA Code of Ethics that those studied not be harmed.”
But on the other hand, Wired continues, some of the early results look impressive:
A “preliminary assessment” of the first HTT, obtained by Wired News, shows the potential impact these social-science groups can make. In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report notes. The Human Terrain Team embedded with the brigade observed that the true power brokers in the area were the mullahs — the local religious leaders.
“After redirecting their outreach effort to the mullahs,” the 4th Brigade “experienced a rapid and dramatic decrease in Taliban attacks…. In the words of the brigade commander, ‘For five years, we got nothing from the community. After meeting with the mullahs, we had no more bullets for 28 days; captured 80 Afghan-born Taliban, 10 Pakistanis, and 32 killed or captured Arabs.'”
At the HTT’s suggestions, the brigade also invited the province’s head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. The religious leader was so moved by the gesture, he recorded radio ads denouncing the Taliban.
Let’s be honest, we’ve heard enough ‘we’ve found the counter-insurgency grail!’ stories over the last few years to warrant a cautious approach to claims like these. Still, as Wired makes clear, the HTTs are already proving to be a useful analytical tool for understanding the culture of a fundamentally backward – some would say essentially medieval – people: colonels in the US Army. Two HTT members found that their first task was to draft a memo complaining about the colonel in charge of their team:
…a military man, not a social scientist – who [they] said had a distinct “disinterest in the Iraqi population, society and culture. He often uses the terms ‘Arab,’ ‘Iraqi,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Sunni,’ or ‘Shia’ interchangeably…. At times, he has even made comments such as ‘when in doubt, kill ’em all.’
